Literacy – Page 6 – St Ninian's Primary School

Weekly update

Another busy week in P1R.

In phonics we met a rude clown who taught us about the ‘Th’ sounds, Mrs Roy made us all stick our tongues out when practising this sound, have a go at home. We played a cool game on the smartboard which revised sh, ch and th where we had to fill the rocket tank with fuel. The game was called Letter Planet and it is on the Topmarks website if you want to play it again. We also made th books and practised spelling th words using magnetic letters.

Subtraction was the focus in numeracy this week and we learned more about mathematical language, did you know there are different words that mean the same as subtraction? We enjoyed playing the Lego subtraction board game with a partner to help us in our numeracy learning and also made subtraction ice cream cones. We also went on a visit to the local shop to finish off our money topic. Everyone had 20p to spend and had to look at the price labels before making our choices. Klaudia and Isla had a great idea to team up and put their money together as they saw something which was 30p, well done girls, good problem solving and teamwork! Nathan found it tricky choosing as there were so many things he liked. Dexter was able to buy 4 things with his 20p, he added the prices together to make 20p.

In RE we were looking after the new life we had planted and we were delighted to see how our seeds had grown. We’ve taken them home now to show our families. We decided to make our Lenten promises and came up with some lovely ideas – Ephraim will help look after his little brother, Brooke will give to the poor, as a class we decided to say an extra prayer every day in school. We also learned about St Patrick while listening to some traditional Irish music – Mrs Docherty visited us to show us her Irish dancing!!

Our pirate adventures continued this week and we all made pirate masks to use in some role-play activities. Isla enjoyed taking videos and pictures as we acted out our pirate adventures. We also wrote stories about being marooned on a desert island which we are going to submit to the Young Writer’s competition. There were some great imaginative ideas and a selection of WOW words.

Continue reading “Weekly update”

Amazing P2/3 News!

What a busy week it has been in Primary 2/3!!

One of the highlights of our week has been the West Lothian Sumdog Challenge. Everyone has worked so hard to achieve a great score. We’ve been working at home, working in school and even had to set up a relay team in class. We were delighted to achieve 34th place out of 211 classes.

The children would also like to share some more highlights:

Oma – I liked our maths carousel because we get to self-assess our work and this helps me learn.

Harry – I liked doing PE because we were working on tennis skills.

Maya Kasia and Annayah – I liked Sumdog because you can play games at the same time as you learn.

Michelle and Dominic – I liked working on ‘green for growth’ because it helps me learn.

Maeve – I liked researching the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs. We used Google to help our research.

Brooke and Andrew – I liked watching the P3 assembly today.

Kuba and Pawel – I liked the literacy carousel because I worked on handwriting, spelling, reflective reading and guided reading.

Levente – I liked working on writing subtraction sums and subtracting tens and units. It was hard at first but it got easier.

Chloe – I liked spelling today because it helps me learn words to use in my story writing on Thursdays.

Alishba – I liked handwriting because it helps me join letters and I get better and better.

Carly – I liked when we wrote about our friends in Big Writing.

Angel – I liked my learning conversation because we talked about my learning and mummies and pyramids.

Nursery News

This week was Stay and Play at Nursery. The boys and girls were very excited to share their learning adventures with their families. They were so confident at showing them round all the areas of the nursery and were then able to join in with their learning. We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came along to these sessions and hope that you all enjoyed your time with us. We look forward to welcoming some more visitors to our Come back and Play sessions which are next week.

We have been discussing and looking for signs of Spring in our learning and to help us with this we had some new additions to our nursery family. It was some caterpillars! We talked about how they grow and we noticed their special food in their tubs. We learned the special name for the home they make for themselves before they turn into butterflies. We also read the story of The very hungry caterpillar. We now have our caterpillars on display with an information board which explains how they grow. We are all super excited to watch the changes over the next few weeks and be able to talk about them. Please have a little look at them the next time you are in the nursery.

We have also been very busy this week making invitations for our Grandparents day which is on Thursday 30th March at 10am and 2pm. These will be making their way home next week. We would appreciate it if you could give us an idea of how many will be coming along to this event for catering purposes and also would be grateful for any donations of cakes or biscuits nearer the time.

Our numeracy and literacy skills have been developing too this week as at small group time we have been counting up to 10 and recognising our names. This has been developed further by the children having the opportunity to find their name at the gluing table and putting it on their work and also at the drawing/ writing table where they can try and find their name and practise writing it. What super workers we have.

Our pre school children were given a letter this week with our transition calendar. We will also be issuing a transition booklet soon which further explains some of our planned activities. This is an exciting time for the children who are getting ready to go to school in August . If you have any questions about any of the activities please ask any member of the nursery team who will be more than happy to help you.

We are trying to move towards a cashless nursery and in order to achieve this we would encourage you to pay your child’s snack money on the online payment of iPay impact. This will also be of benefit when your child goes to school as this system is also used there.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery team.

A busy week in Primary 2/3

It has been another busy week in Primary 2/3 with lots and lots of learning going on! Some of our highlights are:

Andrew – I liked designing a coffin for a mummy. We had to do lots of research first.

Michelle- I liked using the new Heinemann textbooks because I’m getting better at numbers.

Matthew – I liked taking away numbers this week. I used a number square to help me.

Carly – I liked doing our spelling test because it helps me learn words. We keep learning from our mistakes.

Brooke – I liked doing chimney sums in maths. We’re getting really good at them!

Jakub, Annayah, Pawel, Levente, James and Harry – I liked Big Writing when we wrote book reviews for the Killer Cat

Rachel – I liked today’s assembly because pupils from St Margaret’s came to talk to us about SCIAF.

Alishba – I liked when we were doing music with Mrs Steele. We got to dance!

Dominic – I liked doing Sumdog and I’m excited about the West Lothian contest.

Chloe and Maeve – I liked doing art when we made pictures of camels and pyramids.

Maya – I liked working in pairs on Heinemann Active Maths. Its fun working in pairs and it helps you learn.

Zuzanna and Kasia – I liked PE because we were learning tennis skills.

Oma – I liked investigating mummies in Ancient Egypt.

Calvin – I liked working in teams to make posters showing a healthy school in health and well-being.

Have a great weekend!

from Primary 2/3, Mrs Howley and Mrs Keegan

Nursery News

How the weeks are flying by in Nursery! On Tuesday we celebrated Pancake Day. We discussed what ingredients we needed to make pancakes and then the best part we got to eat them😊

The children decided that they would like to change our shop into a pet shop so we now have lots of pet food, toys and pets for sale. The children are really engaged in this learning experience using real money and trying to recognise the coins. Some are also extending this learning at home and even visiting Pets at Home to collect leaflets which is fantastic.

The children have also been enjoying outside learning with lots of cooperative play in all areas. We have had delicious food made in the mud kitchen and lots of imaginative play in our shed using lots of open ended natural resources. We were worried about the birds eating in the cold weather so we made more bird cakes we think they will be eaten very quickly. As it was windy we decided to make wind socks from cartons and material and we also used CDs to hang in the trees and we noticed that the sunlight caught these and made some lovely colours. Great work!

We celebrated World Book Day on Thursday with the children and the staff dressing up as their favourite book characters. Everyone looked fantastic! The children had the opportunity to talk about their favourite book at small group time and we talked about authors and illustrators. We also learned some new vocabulary. The children had even made their own Nursery story book and picked their favourite page in their books which we put out on our display. A very special visitor came to visit us too. It was gangster granny!! Luckily she didn’t get a chance to steal any of our Nursery toys and resources👍 Another special visitor was Szymon’s mum who very kindly read us a story in Polish. Thank you Mrs Dudek😀 We were also lucky enough to be invited to the Primary 1 classes to share a story time. We really loved going into school and getting to sit in a classroom. All the Nursery children were excellent at listening and even put their hands up to answer questions. We were all really proud of them. Thank you to Primary 1M and 1R for asking us😍

It is the turn of our PM children to share their learning this week.

Emilie M ” I like cooking in the kitchen of the house corner.”

Liam ” The Pet shop is my favourite as I love dogs.”

Rojin” I like making things at the play dough table.”

Robert ” I loved making the bird cakes.”

Mark ” We made wind socks and it showed us the direction of the wind.”

As part of our topic on shops we are planning a trip to Pets at Home for both sessions. Please let any member of the team know if your child has any allergies to pets or if for any reason you would prefer them not to take part in this trip. Thank you.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team😊

Bookworms in P1R

What a busy week it has been, we have lots of things to share with you this week.

As the title suggest books have been a big focus in school as we celebrated World Book Day, lots of us dressed us as characters from books.

Our P7 buddies continue to visit us weekly to do paired reading during smart start time. We always look forward to their visits. The PM nursery also visited us this week for a shared reading session with Mrs Young. The boys and girls from the nursery have started their transition programme so will be visiting us more often. James commented that he remembered coming to P1 for World Book Day when be was a nursery boy. How time flies… We decided to become authors in our writing lesson and made our very own picture books. We had to remember to put a title, author, page numbers and pictures, just like in real books. Here are some of the titles chosen by the children:

Lloyd – The Busy Road

Lucy- The Busy teacher

Brooke – The wizard of Oz

Nathan- The tornado

Everyone wrote independently and some even took on the fantastic challenge to add sentences to their stories. Dawid asked if we could go and share our stories with Mrs Purdie AKA Gangsta Granny so that’s what we did. We have also downloaded some new ebooks on our iPads, ask us what ones we have read this week.

Money has still been the main focus in mathematics. We have been learning about more coins this week, 20p, 50p,£1, £2. We all agree that the pounds are the trickiest to remember. Next week we will focus on number names to 10 as we noticed that many coins have the words written on them but we sometimes found it tricky to read them. One of our favourite activities was coin rubbing although sometimes the coins moved around as we rubbed! Try some more rubbing at home, this is one of the homework tasks on the maths menu this term.

In PE we continued to practise our skills in hockey, dribbling, passing, tackling and shooting. Mr Mc Curdy was so impressed with us that he let us play small matches.

On Tuesday we learned about Shrove Tuesday, a day when we have a feast before the beginning of Lent. Mrs Caskie kindly brought in pancakes for us to join in with the celebrations. Then the next day we changed our altar colour to purple as this is the colour for Lent. We also added some daffodils to our altar to represent new beginnings, a sign of Spring, thank you to James for bringing these in. We all joined in with the Ash Wednesday service then came back to class to do some self portrait pictures using pencils and charcoal for the ashes on our foreheads. P4 also did their class assembly about Lent helping us understand more about this important time in the church year. The week ended with a visit from some boys and girls who go to St Margaret’s but used to come to St Ninian’s, they told us all about Malawi and how we can help children who love there. During Lent we are going to try to fill some bags with gifts for the Malawi children.

One last thing to share, we had some visitors in our classroom on Tuesday, they were impressed with how hard everyone was working on their phonics tasks, well done boys and girls, Mrs Roy is very proud of you all! You are all super stars!

Money, money, money

This week we have continued to celebrate Catholic Education Week in our school and discussed how we are developing as a community of faith.

We thought about how we could develop as a faith community at home, school and in our parish. We also made a beautiful display ‘Recipe for a faith community’ then wrote our very own recipes. We finished the week with a whole school faith assembly.

Real life contexts have been the focus in maths as we have started learning about money. We have learned to recognise coins from 1p to £2, ask us what colours they are or to find some in your purse! We have also been working out different ways to make totals, Paul M knew that 100 pennies makes £1 and Ephraim knew that 200 pennies made £2 – aren’t they clever!! Our pirate sweet shop opened this week which has allowed us to use money in a real life context and we have been sorting coins in the emergency money banks. Mrs Roy also let us look in her purse to identify what coins she had, this was great fun. She taught us about notes and bank cards too.

In literacy the sounds are getting harder, this week we learned ‘qu and j’, everyone worked really hard to learn these new sounds through our carousel activities – letterjoin magic words on the ipads, choice and challenge tasks, making jellyfish, qu bingo and lots more! Ask your child what challenges they chose this week in literacy and how they self-assessed themselves.

Mr McCurdy tried something new this week, you had to use a large stick and a ball…..it was hockey. We all impressed him with our dribbling skills and keeping our eyes on the ball when moving around the hall. Nathan really got the hang of this and earned an extra dojo point.

Mrs Purdie asked to see some of our jotters this week, she was really pleased to see how hard everyone had been working and how busy everyone had been. Thank you to the families who came along to Ninian’s Natter to have some learning conversations in the classroom, the children were really proud to show off their learning!

Next week we will be welcoming some visitors to our school and are looking forward to them visiting our classroom to join in with our learning.

Nursery News

Although a short week we still had a very busy one! We returned after the holiday to discover that the birds had eaten all our bird cakes!! They must have been very hungry. We had used our identification sheets to tick off the different types of birds that we had spotted in our garden. We would like to make some more bird cakes as we are sure the birds are still hungry.

Some children came in on Wednesday and were keen to make some valentines so they made lovely heart shaped flowers and talked about their families and friends that they loved.

The children have taken their learning towards the topic of shops so it was decided that we would have our own shop in the Nursery. Our AM children wanted a toy shop last week and our PM children decided on a food shop this week so we have incorporated both. We have been developing our numeracy skills by counting and recognising real coins. Some children have been writing their own shopping lists and taking turns at being both the customer and the shopkeeper. We have all been very good at sharing all the resources. We also discussed the different types of shops that we have and what we could buy in these. We continued this theme at the gluing table by making our own bank cads to use in the shop and also price tickets. If you or your child have any ideas that can be taken forward within this topic we would love you to post them on our visible learning wall. You can also extend this learning at home by discussing with your child about the various different types of shops and what products can be bought in them. Also looking at real coins and helping them to read the numbers on them and look at the shapes. If you are out and about at the shops with your child you can also point out the cashier, tills and scanners. We would welcome any photographs or pictures that you might have or take too.

A little reminder that both sessions will visit the library on Monday. We seemed to have misplaced a library book called ” The monster in the woods” We would appreciate it if you wouldn’t mind having a little look at home just in case it has been borrowed by someone. Thank you in advance.

It is the turn of our PM children to share their learning this week.

Kayla” I love playing in the shop.”

Emilie B and Liam” We made a spaceship with the big blocks”

Mark ” I made some good things at the gluing table”

Milena” I like drawing”

Shea” I love to paint pictures”

Lucas” The sand was my favourite”

Jiya” I did lots of jigsaws”

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team😊

Primary 2/3 Weekly News

It has been a short but really busy week in Primary 2/3. Our highlights included celebrating Catholic Education Week by creating recipes for our Community of Faith and making jelly then writing instructions to help others make jelly too. Everyone loved the Daily Mile today as we saw lots of signs that spring is coming.

These are some of the children’s thoughts:

Maeve ‘We made jelly as part of our Anniversary celebrations. We wrote instructions for how to make jelly then we ate the jelly. It was very tasty!’

Harry ‘Yesterday we had a maths carousel. I was learning how to subtract by playing Sumdog, using the iPads, playing games and figuring out tricky sums.’

Rachel ‘I liked writing instructions for how to make jelly. I was thinking about using openers and connectives.’

Brooke ‘We had a lovely assembly with Father Kenneth and he told us all about his visit to Jerusalem and where Jesus was born’.

Chloe, Carly and Brooke ‘I liked setting goals for the rest of the term. It helps me to remember to focus my learning.’

Levente ‘I liked playing Hit the Button with Kuba in maths’.

Kuba ‘I liked writing a recipe for a Community of Faith. We wrote instructions and I’m good at instructions. ‘

Oma ‘We did check ups in maths. It helps us learn.’

Michelle ‘We learnt about the River Nile in our Egyptians topic. We made notes in our Learning Journals and made signs for the wall.’

Pawel ‘I liked running the Daily Mile when I was running fast’.

James ‘I wrote my name in hieroglyphics. I felt really happy.’

Have a lovely weekend.

From Mrs Keegan, Mrs Howley and Primary 2/3

Celebrating our 40th Anniversary

This has been a really special week as we celebrated our 40th Anniversary on Wednesday. Archbishop Cushley celebrated mass with us which was really lovely. We all felt very special and joined in with the singing and mass responses. The celebrations continued onThursday when it was our Superhero funday. We did arts and crafts, had a special Goldentime, had a piece of anniversary cake and then finished the day with a superhero movie! Thank you to all the P3-P7 children who invited us to their dress rehearsal on Friday, we all thought you were awesome!

In literacy the focus was still on ai and oa. Having a second week on these sounds has helped us become more confident in word building and reading. We really liked the ai board game activity,we worked with an elbow partner to take it in turns to roll the dice and read the ai words. We really impressed Mrs Roy at the muddled sentences station,we worked with a partner to read the words and put them in the right order. We used our knowledge of punctuation to help us. We have added some new phonics apps to our iPads and had great fun trying them out.

Subtraction has been our focus in numeracy and we introduced the number line for taking away. We also remembered last week’s rule when writing subtraction stories, start with the biggest number first. Everyone enjoys using the interactive dice on the smartboard to help us choose numbers for our subtraction sums.

Our pirate adventure is in full flow as we on have our own pirate ship and lots of work on display. Mrs Thomson helped us make our own cutlasses which look amazing! We learned about what pirates like to do in their spare time as this was something we had wrote on our learning wall at the beginning of the topic. Then we had an afternoon of being a pirate and trying out some of their favourite hobbies – playing card games, singing, dancing, telling pirate stories, making own our music with recorders.

In PE we have been trying really hard to perfect our balances, jumps and rolls in gymnastics. We have been peer assessing one another by watching each other and then thinking of 2 stars and a wish to say about their performance. We also learned how to link our movements to make a sequence.